So you’re amassing a good following on Twitter and you know from experience which of your followers tend to retweet and interact with you. But how much do you really know about your Twitter followers?

There are a slew of services that will give you great data on your Twitter followers (and those you’re following) but I am fond of FollowerWonk. It has useable, filterable demographic data, influence ratings, the frequency of their tweets, proportion of retweets and replies and most active times.

A word cloud of my Twitter followers’ bios.

Why do I want that?

It’s useful when you want to get a filterable list of who is following your accounts, who our influencers are and demographic data like gender and location.

How do I use it?

Probably the first thing you’ll want to do is go to “analyze followers” and type in your Twitter handle. Choose “analyze their followers” and wait a minute to produce your first report. You’ll get some useful details about yourself in the right-hand column. This will give you a “social authority” score akin to Klout, and stats on what constitutes most of your tweeting. For example, 28 per cent of my tweets are retweets and 27.5 per cent are @replies, which means I’m a good twitizen but I could be better.

FollowerWonk gives you general information about your account.

You’ll see a map next of your followers. This will show you where your people are (and explain why sometimes you’ll see the letter u in colour and exclamations like “strewth!” Unsurprisingly, most of my followers are in Australia with a good chunk in the US, though sadly on the side of the country where I am not currently looking for work.

Twitter followers for LyndalCairns are split across several countries, and thus timezones.

Because I am a citizen of the world and I have a following split across several time zones, I also find it useful to know when my followers are most active so I can schedule my tweets effectively. National nonprofits will find this especially useful given the three-hour swing from New York to Los Angeles.

Other data includes how many other people your followers are following, how recently they have tweeted and importantly, what percentage of your followers’ tweets are retweets. This is a valuable metric that should indicate how likely they are to retweet you.

Retweets as a percentage of my followers’ tweets.

This is where things get really cool.

If we assume anyone who retweets more than 75 per cent of the time is a spammer and those who tweet less than 25 per cent of the time aren’t likely to retweet us, we can focus on users in that magical 25 per cent-75 per cent category. The real joy of FollowerWonk is that you can click on that category and get a list of Twitter accounts so you know exactly who to target.

Plot your followers who retweet the most.

What’s more, you don’t have to just stop with your own data. You can plug in accounts for folks you follow, famous people, your competitors – anyone. And once you’ve run a report, they stay in the system for you to refer back to. Cool, huh?

FollowerWonk also has a paid service that does much more and allows you to filter your followers by all sorts of categories.

How do I get rid of it?

To unlink or deactivate FollowerWonk, go to settings in Twitter, and then apps. Revoke its privileges and they’ll no longer be friends.